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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of early labor market experiences on the work attitudes of youth, particularly the extent to which secondary labor market or "bad" jobs shape youths' attitudes in an antiwork direction. More specifically, the key interest is in ascertaining what happens to the work attitudes of youths who are comparable on the basis of initial attitudes, pre-labor market background, and human capital characteristics, but who subsequently differed in terms of weeks of unemployment, weeks worked, earnings, occupational assignments, and occupational advancement. Thus, the principal concern of this study is not whether the "unrealistic" attitudes of youths become tempered by the oftentimes harsh realities of the world of work. More importantly, the concern is for whether youths' attitudes which can not be deemed as unrealistic also are shaped in an antiwork direction because of the realities of the labor market, particularly labor market segmentation which may irreversibly misallocate youths during the early stages of career formation.

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This study confirms that unemployment insurance (UI) benefits lead to longer spells of unemployment. While UI benefits also raise post-unemployment wages, these wage effects are statistically significant only in the cases of older males and females. Thus, the predictions of the search model are verified for these older groups of workers, but not for the younger cohorts. At the margin, the percentage wage gain for each additional week of unemployment is larger among older workers and among males.

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The debate over minimum wage thresholds and the larger controversy about good jobs versus bad jobs share a common concern; namely whether low-wage jobs are inherently dead end. The observations reported here suggest that that concern is ill-founded, at least with respect to younger workers. Young labor market entrants certainly don't perceive their minimum wage jobs in that way. A substantial majority of minimum wage youth believe they are acquiring valuable skills, have opportunities for promotion, and even say they like their jobs. The longitudinal experiences of minimum wage youth provide an even more compelling refutation of the notion that minimum wage jobs are inherently dead end. Since virtually all young people hold a job paying the minimum wage or less at some point in their work history, that blanket assertion can be dismissed out of hand. The evidence shows further that youths entering the labor market in the 1980s did particularly well. Specifically, those who started at the minimum wage in 1980 enjoyed impressive wage gains over the subsequent seven years. Insofar as young workers are concerned, minimum wage jobs are correctly viewed as transitions to better jobs, not dead-end endeavors.

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This paper examines (1) the character of unemployment among young women during the recent prosperity (l967 and l968), and (2) whether joblessness among youth seems to have been a serious personal, economic problem.